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Design and development of navigation systems for good delivery uav

Author

Pang, Chun Ho

Date of Issue

2017-05-15

School

School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Abstract

The project titled as “Design and Development of Navigation Systems for Good Delivery UAV” focuses on building and developing an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle that is able to navigate itself from an origin to a designated location. This is extremely useful for the transportation industry as it will allow a smoother and quicker delivery time. This project can be divided in two main aspect, namely hardware and software.
For hardware, it is to develop and build an drone that is powerful and strong enough carry out the necessary experiment on the autonomous flying hence it is important to select the best suitable flight control module and companion computer. In order to achieve the requested functionalities, I have planned to use the Pixhawk flight control module as it is supported by various firmwares and is fully compatible with the ground control application software Mission Planner.
As for the software portion, it is to decide and select the most application operating system and working platform in order to perform the require computation as well as calculations. In the beginning stage, I have planned to make use of the power Robot Operating System (ROS) to allow the UAV to create and draw its own map with necessary information such as obstacles. But there are two major issues that prohibit me from using this method: Weight and computation power; therefore the unmanned aerial vehicle will be running seldomly on the Pixhawk firmware for quadcopter and will be uploading the necessary settings and commands with the Mission Planner.
The final deliverable should be an unmanned aerial vehicle that can fly autonomously and has the capability of following the pre-planned route and navigate itself from a origin point to the destination and perform the instructed action, such as landing or stop over. The installation of firmware, setting of the copter, planning of the flight route will be done with an application on the personal computer prior of the take off.